Has the Poe Toaster called it quits?

Baltimore, Maryland--I think the Poe Toaster--whoever they were over the years--made the right choice in calling it quits. Why? It keeps the memory and the mystery intact and ends things on a good foot. There was good reason to. With the problems of nitwits trying to unmask the shadowy figure who each year made a toast of cognac to Poe, his aunt, and his wife, and left roses to their memory, or senile old men claiming they were that person, it was time to close the curtain. Why make any changes with a legend? Why let someone finally ruin it?

Just three years ago, a self-proclaimed "Poe scholar" named Sam Popora claimed that he was the Poe Toaster stating that he began in 1967, but forgetting that back issues of Baltimore papers record it as having begun around 1949. That's an incredibly bad lie, yet the press swallowed it, sending-out dozens of journalists and video crews to speak with him. A brief search of the Internet would have told them all they needed to know, that Popora was full of shit! Hit on the Poe-labels for more, I was thanked by the director of the Poe house at the time in my comments section during the Popora mishap.

The mystery is very much intact and I hope that the individual who began this journey in 1949 and his family take the facts to the grave. One of the points to life is that there should be mystery to it or it's boring. We need these symbols to feed our souls. Our souls will remain fed on this count, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't expect everyone who reads this to understand why all of this is important, but let sleeping dogs lie, and let the dead finally have their rest.

Mr. Poe's life was a troubled one, and fighting over his remains and trying to attach oneself to his legacy as his literary executors in the 19th century did; Popora in this one attempted to do and also failed; as well as Philadelphia and Boston have during this decade; is undignified. The great American writer is never leaving his resting place in Baltimore, it's never going to happen. Poe died in that city and belongs buried there. Richmond--perhaps--has some claim to him, but Poe lived in Baltimore and has been interred there for well over a century without contest. He is our national treasure, and the man who introduced many of us to mystery. Fitting then that this mystery related to him should remain one, hopefully for all time.

O.J. Simpson's memorabilia was his and yet not his...

WWW--This trial has been very interesting to me for a number of reasons. My brother has worked for over a decade in advertising and had the misfortune of meeting a lot of Northern Indiana businessmen over the years (hint: car dealers think "Top Gun" is the "greatest film ever made"--wrong again).

As one might vividly imagine, most of them are antisocial turds with less personality than a houseplant, but a few of them actually wanted to chum it up with "the help," so my brother had to oblige their overinflated egos.

One of these clowns was a very big O.J. fan. He took my brother down into the basement den of his very expensive and poorly-designed-and-built clapboard where there was a wall literally covered with sports memorabilia.

And there it was, it even had its own display-nook: O.J.'s 1968 Heisman trophy.

"He lets me keep it for him, and I give him money every once in a while," he said (I'm paraphrasing now, isn't it thrilling?). This was within the last eight years. Yeah, it's crazy, but these things just have a way of coming to me and not the reverse, a kind of "Jungian" latticework of coincidence that's plagued my life from its inception.

What is there to gather from this? That O.J. has such an enormous ego that in his mind he wasn't "selling" anything, but "allowing" fans to "rent" his memorabilia in return for an audience with him, to be on his "good" side. I won't even go into what it must have been like to have been on his "bad" side, that's now a foregone conclusion after this trial.

In 1999, O.J.'s Heisman was sold to a Philadelphia--that wonderful town Poe loved so much--businessman named Tom Kreissman, except that he went and sold it to the man who O.J. and his co-conspirators attacked in a Vegas hotel, Alfred Beardsley:

Nevertheless, it’s believed that he bought the 1968 Heisman trophy -- the first and maybe only one ever to be auctioned — from the winner of that 1999 sale. The trophy was originally sold to Tom Kreissman of Philadelphia at Butterfield’s auction house on Sunset Boulevard for $230,000. But a source at Butterfield’s says Kreissman returned and sold it a couple of years later. It’s thought that Beardsley was the buyer. ("O.J. Simpson's 'Victim' Part of a Long-Running Feud," Foxnews.com, 09.20.2007)

And why wouldn't Beardsley have "sold" or rented the thing out to raise money for himself and "the Juice"? Why not?

The unintelligent businessman told my brother, "I went to USC when O.J. was playing there, I've known him since then," and "I'm actually borrowing it from another collector." He exhaled on and on, painting a scenario in which all of these successful old school fans of O.J.'s were shuffling these artifacts around to hide them from the Goldman and Brown families who were doing their best to track down all of the assets he was selling off to pay them from the 1996 civil suit ruling ($33 million).

Hey, who says once something's sold that it's really "sold"?

Over time, O.J. had a number of folks around him who felt he "owed" them money, and the trophy changed hands several times before 1999, and likely afterward:

The man Simpson accused of stealing the items from him is Mike Gilbert, another one-time associate. As Simpson's licensing agent in the late 1990s, Gilbert admitted snatching Simpson's Heisman Trophy and other items from his client's Brentwood home as payment for money he said was owed to him. He later turned the items over to authorities, save the trophy's nameplate.

Gilbert swore he'd go to jail before turning the nameplate over to the Goldman family, which was trying to collect on the $33.5 million civil judgment won against Simpson. Gilbert later surrendered it under court order. ("O.J.'s Vegas Accuser Says He Wants Charges Dropped," Foxnews.com, 09.15.2008)

Yeah, real class act folks there. After 1999, the trail appears to grow cold, wikianswers-be-damned, the Wikiuniverse almost never being correct about anything.

I think that the Goldmans had a good idea this kind of shell game (aka "three card monty") was going on with wealthy fans of O.J., a constant shifting of the memorabilia around with a rental fee and lots of broken promises. Egomaniacs like Simpson can convince themselves of almost anything, the same applying to pea-brained American businessmen with penis envy.

My feeling is that these people aren't mere fans, but criminals--all of the players involved in ferring around O.J.'s memorabilia. Beardsley is just a flash point. I hope that this verdict smokes the rest of them out and that they pay the price of aiding a vile murderer simply because they love football too much. To these clowns, the murders don't even matter--only football does. What a pathetic bunch. I wouldn't use that Heisman for a doorstop, although it would make a great lighter/ashtray combination with a few modifications.

None of it matters, the game is over, finally, at long last. But I still have to wonder: where's O.J.'s 1968 Heisman...and why would anyone in their right mind want it? They may as well buy one of those lousy John Wayne Gacy oil-paintings while they're at it.

"O.J. Simpson's 'Victim' Part of a Long-Running Feud," Foxnews.com, 09.20.2007: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297400,00.html

"O.J.'s Vegas Accuser Says He Wants Charges Dropped," Foxnews.com, 09.15.2008: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296934,00.html

Why Edgar Allan Poe Belongs in Baltimore

Baltimore, Maryland/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania--As a disinterested party living in Indiana, this whole affair seems somewhat concocted and at the primary instigation of one Edward Pettit, who wrote a provocative piece on October 2nd in the Philadelphia City Paper (a cover article) calling for the disinterment of the writer from Baltimore to the city of brotherly love.

Pettit is a literary scholar and critic living in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and has a good pedigree as as a member of the National Book Critics Circle. That said, his own piece contains elements that undermine his argument on a number of key-points.

Overall, the reasoning by Mr. Pettit for why Poe belongs buried in Philadelphia is flatly wrong: Edgar Allan Poe always considered himself a Southerner first, and was raised primarily in Richmond, Virginia. This is a frequently overlooked fact, perhaps more than his time in Philadelphia is. Beyond this obvious fact is what we all know--that Poe died in Baltimore, and that he wrote his very first horror short story 'Berenice' while in the city.

The story was published in 1835, in the Southern Literary Messenger. This has been astutely noted by the Poe House and Museum's curator Jeff Jerome, in an October 10th issue of the Baltimore Sun, but is widely known, and certainly known to Mr. Pettit. But it appears a number of individuals with selfish interests would like to hijack the legacy of our greatest writer for the sake of local prestige and those coveted tourism dollars. Remember back to August when the doddering Sam Porpora claimed to be the Poe toaster, an obvious and bald lie. Yet, the press ate the story up with undue credulity. The call by Pettit is begging-the-question of where Poe's body belongs, and engages in some very peculiar logic. While the writer and critic has uncovered some very interesting details on Poe's time in Philadelphia, he makes the peculiar assertion that the great writer somehow felt in his element there and would have had a large funeral in the city of brotherly love at the time of his death...had he died there. As we all know, he did not.

As historians--and Pettit himself--have pointed-out, dying at an early age in Philadelphia during the time Poe resided there (1838-1844) would have been fairly easy. The city was riven with ghastly official corruption, labor violence and strikes, race riots, rampant and unsolved crime, poor hygiene, runaway disease, and squalid poverty. Appropriately, it all sounds a bit like Poe's own life (because it was), as well as a page from one of his own short stories.

All of these factors were typical of conditions in the city centers at the time, but Philadelphia was one of the worst examples (and still is), along with New York City at the bottom for its inhumanity and modern indifference. Another city had the same conditions: Baltimore, a fact made clear by the very few facts that we know surrounding Poe's mysterious death. Note this passage from Pettit's op-ed from October 2nd:

Poe, if we define him by his macabre works, felt right at home. Could he have experienced all of this in other cities? [Ed.-As a matter of fact, he could have.] He most certainly could have, but it was in Philadelphia that he wrote most about these kinds of experiences. Before living in Philadelphia, his horror tales were more grounded in a European Gothicism. Post-Philadelphia, Poe's personal problems — erratic behavior, sporadic drunkenness, poverty, his wife's illness and death — take over his life, diminishing his creative output until his own early death a mere five years later. (Philadelphia City Paper, 10.02.2007, http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/10/04/were-taking-poe-back )

The problem with Pettit's so-called 'logic' should be obvious even on casual inspection--he notes that Poe's writing tails-off after Philadelphia, and he makes a bald move to separate the writer's life from his work while simultaneously saying they are one. This reveals the self-serving component of a Pennsylvania son. To say it has an element of the tedious and the banal would be too fair.

For Poe to return to Philadelphia would have been some kind of nightmare for Poe, and it still is to many living there today. While living in Philly during the late-1960s, director David Lynch witnessed a murder in front of his own flat. This has proven to be the genesis of his own confrontations with the darkness throughout his own original body of work in film. Should the Montanan David Lynch be interred in Philadelphia when he dies? He's lived in Los Angeles since 1970. Abraham Lincoln lived in Indiana for over ten years of his life--should he buried here? There are equally serious questions.

Poe didn't need Philadelphia in any exclusive sense to find horror along the American landscape of his time. Like many fallen Southern aristocrats, he feared 'the mob,' or 'the crowd' of 'rabble.' Crime, rioting and strife were everywhere, punctuated by the occasional slave rebellion. Poe was not enamored with democracy. To his eyes--rightly--chaos was everywhere. Labor conditions were so horrible that they spawned violence, rioting, strikes, and the birth of organized unions. Flight to the frontier offered little respite from misery. Just two years before his untimely death, we would see the ethnic cleansing of the Trail of Tears, while the year before brought us the horrors of the Mexican-American war under that forerunner of George W. Bush, President James K. Polk. Slave rebellions occurred during Poe's life as well, and poverty and rioting were a common part of life.

In 1833--just two years before Poe wrote 'Berenice'--the Nat Turner slave rebellion occurred, nearly touching-off civil war decades before the real thing exploded in 1861. The heads of the rebellious slaves were fitted onto posts as a warning to other rebels. There were other economic woes. Mr. Pettit mentions the economic depression of 1842 (occurring while Poe was in Philly) in his sprawling piece, which is really more a testament to typing than a valid attempt at proving a thesis. This fitting example should prove the point:

Between his reputation for writing imaginative fiction and withering reviews, his writings were sought after by many other periodicals around the nation." Poe's initial successes in the city diminished by 1844. Poe's irascibility and drinking problems, exacerbated by his wife's tuberculosis, began to alienate the editors whom Poe needed to court for work. (ibid)

Yet:

Had Poe died in Philadelphia, there would have been a huge funeral. The penny press would have trumpeted the announcement for a solid week. Philadelphia has always had a way of celebrating its disasters, its ne'er-do-wells. Poe, found delirious, possibly drunk, in a tavern, taken to a hospital where he dies raving like a lunatic? ...True enough, while newspapers around the country were maligning Poe's name, Philadelphia's Quaker City Weekly was blasting a clarion to defend it: "As an author, his name will live, while three-fourths of the bastard critics and mongrel authors of the present day go down to nothingness and night." Poe still had friends in Philadelphia. (ibid)

Pettit waxes faux-nostalgic on how there would have been parades in the city of Philadelphia had Poe died there...but history isn't about 'what ifs,' as any credible historiographer will tell you. What seems most likely is to be found in his own article--that Poe hated the city and its squalor, its crime, its indifference, and that he feared the people of the city who Pettit claims would have championed him. It's a ludicrous assertion.

The city of Philadelphia was not good for him or his young wife who was dying from tuberculosis the entire time. Poe found the dark city to be a slice of hell. Had the support for him been so ubiquitous as Pettit implies, why did he have to leave to find work elsewhere? All he had were the 'editors,' and his friends were few in the city of brotherly love. Poe earned much of this animus due to a very unstable nature made worse by his alcoholism. Very few people attended his funeral in 1849, as he likely would have had it.

What is well known is that Poe contributed greatly to the indifference and animosity--if not outright hatred--he was frequently greeted with, and like most writers of his time, he was treated very poorly indeed by his publishers and 'editors.' Note also in Pettit's piece that he willfully ignores the fact that Poe wanted to be known as a poet, and that the horror stories were a way of paying the bills to his mind.

'The Raven' was a new step in his writing career that melded both together in way that was probably more pleasing to a very troubled man with a very miserable and unsatisfying life, but a good part of the misery was of his own making. That life, and his works, are inseparable, and Mr. Pettit knows better. It's unlikely Mr. Poe would have wanted to continue his vagabond life on-the-move in death as he had in life. Lastly, in what is already an unwarranted piece overall, Mr. Pettit enjoins his fellow members of the crowd to break the law and disinter Mr. Poe's remains by traveling down I-95 to Baltimore, echoing the lawless attitudes of 160 years ago that the writer so feared.

You're not taking anything back, Mr. Pettit, he was never yours. What's likely is Poe will never leave Maryland, lawsuits will drag-on well after all of our insignificant lifetimes, and that an armed guard will be indefinitely posted at the Westminster Burying Grounds if it's necessary. You can bank on it.

The response from 'Balmer,' 10.10.2007: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.vozzella10oct10,0,3325218.column?coll=bal_news_local_util